Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art Article Explores Ethics and Aesthetics in Political Art

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
ISSN: 1443-4318 (Print) 2203-1871 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raja20
Documentary/Vrit: Bio-Politics, Human Rights

and the Figure of Truth in Contemporary Art
Okwui Enwezor
To cite this article: Okwui Enwezor (2004) Documentary/Vrit: Bio-Politics, Human Rights and
the Figure of Truth in Contemporary Art, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 5:1, 11-42,
DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2004.11432730
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2004.11432730
Published online: 18 May 2015.
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DocumentaryjVerite: Bio-Politics,
Human Rights and the Figure of
''Truth" in Contemporary Art
0KWUI ENWEZOR
The only relation to art that can be sanctioned in a reality that stands under
the constant threat of catastrophe is one that treats works of art with the
same deadly seriousness that characterises the world today.
Theodor Adorno 1
We shouldn't let ourselves be overly impressed by the false maturity of the

moderns who do not see a place for ethics-which they denounce as
moralism-in reasonable discourse.
Emmanuel Levinas2
Prologue
This essay invites two analogous and complementary readings of ethics and
aesthetics in contemporary art. The first part seeks to understand the relationship
between the ideas of ethics and aesthetics that frame current debates in what is
otherwise called political art. The second part is concerned with types of artistic
practice that straddle the realm of art and documentary, and the problems they
pose to our comprehension of reality in the context of art works, media images
and exhibitions of contemporary art. In the first, I shall analyse reasons for the
remarkable transformation of the concept of the political in contemporary art,
especially as it concerns both the subject and content of such art, that make
secondary the formal means of the work. While in the second, the exhibition
Documenta 11, provides the exemplary notice as a specific case study for how to
read the disfigured tradition of the documentary as it converges with a surprisingly
conservative notion of the disinterestedness of art in its relations with social life.
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
The Unhomely and the Anxiety of Global Modernity

A distance of nearly fifty years separates us from Adorno's statement, a statement
all the more remarkable for its prescience in situating the strange disarticulation
of criticality in recent art which above all else values an over-metabolised
formalism by means of a strong return to abstraction in the advanced sectors of
the art economy. To the degree that the art economy of the gallery system puts a
high premium on commodity objects, the return to formalism and abstraction
heralds a return to a kind of conservatism that all but abjures the kind of art
which continuously registers a sense of what Sartre would have called engagement.
What I am calling abstraction here should be understood not just in the sense of
metaphysics. Modernist abstraction especially, unfolds out of mechanistic, formal,
and stylistic devices that constitute its representational frame--with a tendency
towards the transcendental and the universal, on the part of Abstract
Expressionism, and the metaphysical, in the case of geometric abstraction. In
contemporary art, however, all these have become sublated, thereby pushing the
concept of abstraction more in the direction of the opacity evident in recent
abstract art's artful contentlessness. In spite of this deflation, a visible schism exists
today between the aesthetes of formalism and those practitioners with political
leanings who, with dim memories of the institutional takeover of historical
consciousness hovering over them nevertheless insist on art's engagement with
social life. What should be noticed in the current context, however, is how
distanced works of art that evince a political stance are from the old two-part
model on the one hand of Marxist critique of the commodity form and
bourgeois society, and on the other, abstraction's interiorisation of artistic vision
as a uniquely and internally coherent world in which individual enactment takes
precedence over that of the collective or social. The latter view purges the
external world from the space of art, wishing for it a state of purity, a state which
not only rejects illusionism, but also asserts that the full meaning of any art is to
be found in its specific medium. This is the story of a particular view of art
overseen by a brand of modernism famously argued for by Clement Greenberg. 3
Today we are more or less witnessing the complete dissolution and
evaporation of a kind of politically-driven art practice based on some notion of
the critique of the commodity form and the struggle over the ownership of the
means of production, determinations coterminous with a Marxian model of class
struggle. If class formations no longer animate the modes of political art today,
the other side of this development is the return of formalism as nothing but a
great emptying out and banishment of the concept of the political in artistic
matters, as if this would provide a cure for the anxiety of modernity. There is a
novel idea behind this anxiousness surrounding the modern today, at the root of
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which is the crisis of the political in current artistic practice. Recent elaborations
on modernity hold that within the space of less than two decades we have passed
through two endings of modernity: first, with the collapse of communism and
the fall of the Berlin Wall, we bore witness to the demise of a Marxist vision of
modernity and se~ondly, after September 11, 2001, came the dissolution of its
liberal counterpoint. It is tempting indeed to embrace the tenets of these grand
conclusions, were it not for the inconclusiveness of history itself. No doubt, the
architectural metaphor that accompanied both collapses of two of the most
significant political traditions of the modern era helps frame them both in time
and image; modernity as a specter that hangs over the global collective
conscwusness.
What has emerged, however, is different from this, and for cultural politics is
not insignificant. The schism masks a deeper anxiety about the period we can call
global modernity. This anxiety is manifest in an emerging battle within the
critical comprehension, reception, and discussion of contemporary art, namely
the opposition between ethics and aesthetics, or the conjunction of both.
Recently, discussions of the relation between ethics and aesthetics, or politics and
poetics in contemporary art have proliferated. The current upsurge in linking the
ethical and the aesthetic-or the more familiar conjunction of art and politics-
perhaps, owe something to what Irit Rogoff has described as the nature of
"'unbounded' or 'undisciplined' work" common to both artistic practice and its
multiple locations today. 4 This unboundedness, which I have designated
elsewhere as the condition of unhomeliness, is partly the result of a wide scale
global modernity of peoples, goods, and ideas permanently on the move, in
constant circulation, reconfiguration, tessellation. 5 The condition of unhome-
liness could also be interpreted in another way: in the alienation of our subjective
development from the forces of domination and totalisation, namely the ideology
of unchecked capitalist triumphalism that seeks to sever alternative social models
and relations of exchange not already bound exclusively to consumption and
consumerism. This alienation, or simply the withdrawal from the homogenising
tyranny of global capitalism, discloses new subjectivities on the verge of
transforming what Felix Guattari calls the "mass-media subjectivity" proper to
the discourse of totalisation. 6 In contemporary art this is being felt in the
rejection of the singularity of the art object, image, or the cultural system that
seemingly holds art together in a unified and universalised conception of artistic
subjectivity. In Rogoff's idea of unbounded and undisciplined work there arises
something no longer notional: artists' withdrawal from the institutionalised
(musealised) model of art. Rather, for several decades now we have witnessed the
inexorable attempt by artists to break with this totalisation. Such attempts reveal a
13
structured and self-conscious "indiscipline" against the conservative institutional

idealisation of art. 7
For contemporary art and other cultural practices, indisciplinarity and
unhomeliness is not just being out of tune with the established order nor the
feeling and consciousness of being elsewhere, in exile, dislocated, displaced or
rootless, but the contemplation in art that "culture operates metonymically,
always simultaneously at separate but parallel registers."s There is a recognition,
by a surprising number of practices of contemporary art that assume activist and
political modes of position-taking in the critical analysis of culture, that the
dispersal of the discourses of art as it was once organised by postmodernism has
now reached a watershed moment. The effect of this dispersal is that there is no
singular location of culture or contemporary art. While artistic practices of the
kind described above often appear in exhibitions and institutions of contem-
porary art, their destination and target extend well beyond those fora into the
larger domain of the global public sphere. In a sense the global public sphere is
both the destination of such art and its target as well, for increasingly the kinds of
contemporary art that assume an activist and political position have tended to be
transnational in their strategy and tactically concerned with the location of art in
the condition of the unhomely, that is, in the present.
The Human as a Limit Case of Modernity: Neo-Political

Realism and the Twilight of Class in Artistic Practice
If we are, indeed, witnessing over not just a structural antinomy but also a shift in
the ideals of modern culture and its images, we do so to the degree that class
struggle, which once heralded the promise of a grand social realignment of
international civil society in economic and political terms, no longer defines the
relationship between different actors in the political and cultural arena. Rather it
is "Human Rights" that provides the ethical compass for our interaction with the
world and one another. I will argue that the kinds of political realism in artistic
practices often associated with social reality, and which to a great extent are also
engaged with ethical consideration for human subjects, owe a great deal to the
discovery by contemporary art of the importance of the idea of"bio-politics": a
politics grounded in explorations of the meaning of life and the ethico-juridical
sanctity of the human within current global realignments of political, economic,
and cultural formations.9,to In the former third world colonies inAsia,Africa, the
Middle East, and Latin America, liberation and decolonisation movements were
at the vanguard of this political and cultural reorientation. In the former second
world the struggle against communist control of all social and cultural forces gave
great impetus to the search for new political alternatives to the socialist utopia
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disfigured by Stalinism. In the first world of the West, the third and second world
positions pointed to above were linked up with struggles occurring in areas such
as civil rights, feminist movement, gay movement, and anti-racist, anti-war and
anti-nuclear movements. The combination of all three interpretations of freedom
(what could also be called a politics of rights) is at the heart of a new kind of
political order to which contemporary art responds. The organising instrument is
"Human Rights" both in the narrow sense articulated by the Universal
Declaration of Rights and in the broad sense of ethical filiation to the very
structure of existence. While philosophy has engaged this question for a long
time, its encapsulation in cultural and artistic terms is recent. In fact, it is worth
emphasising that the radical codification ofbio-politics as the stress in the ethical
relationship between a person and the state is specifically the issue taken up by
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General
Assembly, on December 10, 1948. Though it does not spell out contemporary
artists' concern with the ethical in a specific sense, but in a more general sense
this text is particularly illuminating when one attends to contemporary artists'
concern with the ethical. Both the preamble and Article 3 of the declaration spell
it out. In the first two paragraphs of the preamble the rationale is established:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and

inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of
freedom,justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in

barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the
advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech
and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the
highest aspiration of the common people
Article 3 reiterates the preamble unequivocally: Everyone has the right to life,
liberty and security of person.!!
Human rights craft thus began with the idea of the human as a limit case
under overwhelming coercive force. Therefore, if human rights were constructed
for human beings, it would logically follow that human rights as such are regimes
crafted to accede to and intercede on behalf of the human. Such rights then, can
only be accorded to life and therefore only to the living, hence the importance
of bio-politics. We know the immediate historical context that attended and
supported this juridical commandment, and it has an image: Auschwitz.
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAl OF ART
Auschwitz was based on the evidence of the overwhelming industrial manu-

facture of death. Photographs and documentary footage of the liberated camps
confronted the world with an ethical question, namely, if the Nazis murdered
their victims by first reducing them to the legal category of the non-human, how
can the enlightened laws of the post war international system restore such rights?
Thus the Holocaust has come to represent the exemplary test for the question of
the human. More than fifty years have not lessened its lesson, if anything it has
intensified the questions it raises. Even as Foucault claimed that "what is at stake
today is life" it would appear that despite the frequency of wholesale slaughters
taking place today, we have become more inured than ever to what Susan Sontag
calls "the pain of others," while human rights discourse has grown even more.12, 13
The helplessness of the Palestinian struggle and quest for self-determination and
a homeland illustrates this. This helplessness is made all the more hopeless when
given an image: the Intifada, which has been sometimes described as the struggle
between two categories of victims and dispossessed: the Arab and the Jew.14
Being for the Other and the Ethics of Looking

In this regard, Sontag's analysis and defense of photographic or filmic represen-
tations that draw our attention to catastrophes initiated by violence is striking,
especially since it goes against the grain of the treatment of images of violation as
merely a media window into banal spectacle, as a worrying pornography of
victimisation and violation. 15 She argues forcefully against such reductive
reasoning about the meaning of images in public discourse, instead she made a
plea for what could be called an "ethics of looking" in our confrontations with
the pain of other people. The eye as an ethical apparatus, more than a prophy-
lactic membrane to ward off the unseemly, the evil eye of death, locates the visual
field as the site "for an unfinished work of mourning."16 For the most part,
Sontag's excursus was concerned with documentary photography and photo-
journalism and their ability to touch a part of the spectator's humane feeling, in
short, the concern for another human being.
Despite her passionate, trenchant argument-persuasive both in its substance
and in its analytical insight about photography ballasted by numerous historical
examples-suspicions of the ideological machinations that surround the kind of
images she offers in her examples remain quite entrenched within visual art. In
visual art, a hole in vision, a blindspot, the blank stare, a halating gaze, have been
developed as the essential prophylaxis proper to the documentary form. To wit,
there is often a moralisation in the name of critical questioning of the morality of
the documentary that has consistently degraded its efficacy unless it is treated
allegorically, ala Warhol. This paradoxical situation corrodes the peculiar position
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taken by art that stakes a territory within the tension between ethics and
aesthetics, or politics and poetics.
The question of paying attention to the "pain of others" especially as it is
registered and indexed in representation (be it photographic, filmic, and archival)
arises purely as a consequence of the development of human rights. Yet others
have argued, precisely, against this identification of the documentary. To purists,
documentary's "noble" tradition abjures those kinds of images of the mass
anonymous others often caught unawares or dead in the sooty, grainy newsprint
of the global news industry. It also refuses the aestheticised horror pictures
stylised for quick uncritical consumption as redemptive "truth," as evidence or
tokens for which contemporary guilt industries (Amnesty International, Doctors
Without Borders, etc.) images that court unrestrained witness bearing. Thus the
claim of a double kind of violence being visited upon the figures of the violated
by the mere repetition of the tabular index of horror.
This begs the question: why have contemporary artists responded to human
rights or concern for the other as the ethical limit of any engagement with the
world? One suspects that modern traumatography abetted by the machinery of
media technologies has much to answer for here. The frequency with which a
large group of artists such as Faizal Sheik, Alfredo Jaar, Kendell Geers, William
Kentridge, amongst others, take-up such positions in their work may then lead one
to conclude, though not unqualifiedly, that images of the mass phenomenon of
displaced people, the carnage of war, genocidal massacres, crimes against humanity,
the devastation of famine, man-made ecological disasters and natural disasters in
the media have been contributing factors. Also radical art, like radical politics, has a
natural response to power that gives a certain frisson to the Faustian relationship
between ethics and aesthetics, politics and poetics. But if the ethical is a test for our
commitment to each other's being, qua existence, how do we square this test with
the aesthetic, which in Kantian fashion is concerned with the "lofty" ideal of the
sublime, the sensation of the beautiful?t7 When W B Yeats writes about a terrible
beauty being born, is this not the ground of the ethical and aesthetic (which now
is being cheaply merchandised as a special kind of political effect in contemporary
art) heaving before us? 18 Are singularised affects of denunciation effective artistic
arguments against complex political realities? Or might this concern be more in
line with Levinas's moral philosophy of an ethical relationship between two
people, grounded in the cognitive embodiment of the other's existence?
Activism and Counter-Power

I will now try to explore the general topography of politically oriented art and
its roots in current discussions of power and rights, which elucidates some of the
17
issues I have been tracing. I should also make clear that I am using human rights
here in a strictly narrow sense: in its manifestation in politically oriented art, and
the putatively ethical weight it gives such art. One of the central principles of
contemporary art that unambiguously effects a political stance, is its engagement
with bio-politics. The second principle is that its actions seek to mediate the
relationship between national and transnational domain of rights. A typical
example is the German-based Kein Mensch ist Illegal, a collective of activists,
artists, and tactical media groups working around issues of immigration, and on
behalf of refugees, sans papiers, and in raising awareness around the often violent
deportation of illegal immigrants from European countries. Kein Mensch ist
Illegal, both in its work and its configuration, has moved beyond the traditional
framework of being purely an artistic or activist group. It is neither one nor the
other. Put another way, it is consciously hybridised, which means it is both an
activist and artistic group simultaneously. This allows a degree of flexibility in its
tactical formations, along with the tools of its work, which adopt and adapt the
instruments of art, propaganda, media, and social protest as make-shift swerving
speculums, probing and testing the resilience of the system's attempt to contain
disobedience. While its activities are grounded in the struggles for rights of those
spectral, shadowy communities comprising immigrants, refugees, and san papiers,
Kein Mensch ist Illegal disavows any interest in charity or humanitarian work.
Rather its principal focus is on the question of rights. This stance is also the
source of its name: based on the juridical idea that "no one is illegal." For Kein
Mensch ist Illegal, to declare a class of people as illegal is to refute the very
foundation of human rights; a negation, which it suggests, questions the very
category of the human, specifically the non-European other as a foreigner, the
unwelcomed stranger.19
Xenophobia, Xenophilia, Racism and the Human

As Sarat Maharaj has shown and in the work of Ruth Wodak there is an intense
correlation between xenophobia and xenophilia in the discourse of racism.20, 21,22
Xenophobia and xenophilia manifest assumptions in their understanding of race
in their excessive non-recognition and recognition of the other. The fundamental
ethical lapse in both is the manner in which each, in its own way, elides the
complex assumptions which undergird the politics of race in contemporary
culture. It is not a coincidence that the discourse of multiculturalism and certain
digestible acknowledgments of difference have suffered in the context of art and
culture due to this ambiguity. Furthermore, xenophobia and xenophilia underline
an uneasiness and a false intimacy with the subject of racism. Both can be
irrational either in its phobic response to the other or in its obsessive enthusiasm
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for all things different. In cultural and artistic discourse this schism cannot be
emphasised enough. This negation which is both the source of xenophobia and
racism is apparent the recent rise of far right parties which run on anti-immigrant
political planks and are often unambiguously racist in their discourse.23 The late
Pim Fortuyn, who made the non-European immigrant the antithesis of a
sustainable ideal of multicultural Netherlands, designed his entire party manifesto
around what he called Livable Netherlands, a quality oflife program advocating the
expulsion of immigrants from the Netherlands. Racism, as such, is demonstrably
an example of the human as a limit case, for it conceives of the other on the basis
of a defect, as the pure manifestation of a negation. 24 Therefore to make the other
or the "victim" the subject of art, as the image of a critical recall that stands
between the artist and the spectator, before the institution and the law brings her
contingent status in representation to a level of visibility hitherto unrecognised by
the regimes of invisibility that otherwise surround and veil her in public
discourse. Such a human presence disturbs, agitates, and discomfits the visual field
in which her presence is both registered and so to speak extirpated. This
appearance-which is always anticipated with anxiety for it is the impossible
visibility of an apparition, the immanence of the stranger-has been described by
Julia Kristeva when speaking of the stranger amongst us as that which disturbs
identity, order, legality.2s, 26 The human as a ghostly presence, as more than a
metaphor for illegality, as a shadow before the law, marks the separation between
those identified as legal, and therefore properly human (Europeans, White Men)
and those (Africans, Arabs, Roma, Asians, women, gays and lesbians etc.) who
must seek the status of normalcy for their inclusion into the human family by
first exorcising their strangeness, foreignness, otherness.
Thus, while it has spotlighted violations by the German government of
European Union human rights laws concerning the repatriation and deportation
of refugees and asylum seekers, Kein Mensch ist Illegal works against the German
immigration law in the name of a larger universal ethical principle, one that
repudiates the illegalisation of desperate immigrants. The given doxa of classical
political art is that it intervenes within the means of production and in the cracks
between the tectonic plates of class formations. It was not until the rise of fascism
that it became clear that the subject of political art was about to be transformed.
It never recognised, however, the importance of otherness and its potent political
reality within the visual field. Careful appraisal of artistic formations today makes
it clear that they deviate from classical ideas of political art, at least in one respect.
The target of this art is not simply systemic, centered on the political entity of
the state, its ideology, apparatus, agents. Rather, it involves a perhaps surprising
principle of the universalisation of the concept of the human evoked by human
19
rights. It is on behalf of such a universal principle that institutions and organs of

global multinational and transnational business and policy bodies-such as the
International Monetary Fund, World Bank or Nike, Shell, Exxon-have also
become targets of attack. The methods, employed in the name of art, to address
some of these issues consequently have had to change, both in their form and
orientation. It is in this sense that Rogoff's notion of the unbounded and
undisciplined work is a brilliantly novel conceptualisation of what many think of
as the conjunction between politics and art or ethics and aesthetics.27 Such work,
in my view, neither sensationalises aesthetics nor spectacularises the ethical.
The Deterritorialised Site of Art and Politics:

Contemporary Art in a Time of Crisis
A distinguishing feature of the ethical and aesthetical in current practice is its
deterritorialised nature. As I have been arguing, this kind of work is Janus-faced:
it is conscious of its form and right as an artistic intervention while imbricating
its relation to the conditions and topographies of reception beyond the
traditional boundaries of art. It should also be noted, that this kind of work is
distinctly different from the old political art of the European avant-garde which
regarded fascism as the enemy and whose politics were based on the solidarity of
working class struggles, which it hoped would lead to the relation of the utopia
of proletarian rule and culture. The productivist model of the Russian avant-
garde in the Soviet Union after 1917 was inspired by this utopianism. The same
was the case for instance in Mexico where revolutionary artists such as Diego
Rivera and other Muralists were concerned with the relation of a worker's rule
through the power of a peasant revolution. Or in the Resistance Art model in
South Africa where art under apartheid harnessed its energy to the overthrow of
a totalitarian and racist regime.
Partly because of the revolution in communication technologies, art and politics
are now much more broadly concerned with conditions of social life: the
environment, human rights, globalisation, racism, nationalism, and social justice. In
their combination they identifY and interact with disciplinary formations that
distend the formal boundaries of official artistic discourse. Nevertheless, the
surprising, and some would argue troubling, aspect of this kind of work is its
tendency to transform ethical concerns into aesthetic devices and vice versa. To the
degree that artists editorialise on the nature of social life today, the critical ability of
such actions to effect change remains, thus far, in remand. But what interests me in
this development is not whether activist or politically invested artists express the
"correct position" with the correct forms, instead I am interested in their always
stated interest in an ethics rooted in the conception ofbio-politics.28
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Thus when we attempt to grasp the conjunction of ethics and aesthetics, or

politics and poetics, we must in effect recognise the importance and global
dimension of the discourse of human rights. Consequently, even when what
artists spotlight may be local-such as Alfredo Jaar's work on Rwanda, and the
Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India-the tactical public is always global.29
Jaar has throughout his career made the critique of predatory capitalism and
human rights violations signature issues in his work. In Let there be Light: The
Rwanda Project, 1994- 1998 Jaar was one of first (and remains one of the few)
artists to respond to the mass killings that took place over a period of one
hundred days in the summer of 1994. Artists like Jaar, (here the art of Hans
Haacke is crucial) work at disclosing the complex transnational web that
illuminates not only their project but also the interests of multinational
formations. Take, for example, Haacke's sculpture Isolation Box, 1986, a cube of
plywood that evokes the claustrophobia of confinement and imprisonment made
in the aftermath of the US invasion of Grenada. Whether in Jaar or Haacke's
work what we witness is a new kind of thinking that has inverted and
transformed the old maxim: "all politics is local" to "all local politics is now
global." The universal umbrella of human rights offers a peculiar sort of
protection to local causes once they are reframed in a global context. Notice, for
instance, that many grassroots social movements and Non-Governmental
Organisations may have their specific contexts in local conditions, but often
appeal to the global public sphere in order to make effective their individual
projects. Sub-commandante Marcos and his Zapatista's in Mexico, AIDS activists'
campaign against pharmaceuticals in South Africa, the late Ken Saro Wiwa's
Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) in Nigeria are recent
examples of this transformation. Even the most odious of these interests, Al
Qaeda, uses the appeal of various local anti-modern Islamic fundamentalisms to
export its universalising ethos of terror and spiritual redemption.
Where political or ethical considerations are specifically foregrounded in an
artist's work-for example in the work of the realist painter Leon Golub; Paul
Stopforth's graphite drawings during his years in South Africa; Luis Camintzer's
investigations of torture in Uruguay during that country's dictatorship; Willie
Doherty's videos and photographs detailing the sectarian conflict in Northern
Ireland; Martha Rosier's reworking of images of the Vietnam war as a measured
critique of American neo-colonial offensive in Southeast Asia; Chris Burden's
Vietnam War counter-memorial, William Kentridge's drawings for projection
which focus on the legacy of apartheid, the solemn performance of the activist
group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo's daily vigil in Buenos Aires in behalf of their
disappeared children during Argentina's "dirty war"- human rights as such
21
frames the relationship between the producer and receiver. An artist such as Leon
Golub, has made resistance to the constant threat of disappearance of public
memory a test for the stress between the ethical and aesthetic. Golub's
unrealistically painted realist paintings are conceived specifically as counter-
paintings to the opacity of formalist abstraction in which the specificity of the
human form had been annulled. For four decades he has demonstrated his
commitment to indexing and reelaborating in his unsettled, agitated paintings
media images that represent in extremis the precariousness of the human body
under violent state repression. In such key series of works as Vietnam
(1972-1974), Mercenaries (1979-1987), Interrogations (1981-1986) and White
Squads (1982-1987) we are confronted by a panoply of fragmented and isolated
images projected against the backdrop of neutral surroundings all of them
specific to and concerned with the deracination of human life. It's as if both
naked power and naked life are simultaneously isolated in the ghostly outlines of
his sparsely painted, distressed, cleaved canvasses. Likewise, Stopforth's mortuary
drawings-a set of reductive drawings of fragments of Steve Biko's mutilated
body after his death from torture-performs a similarly mnemonic role as
Golub's and are no less powerful for their overt political claim to representing
violations of the body. Similar concerns are the frame around which Camintzer's
From the Uruguay Torture Series is defined. In each of these artistic positions what
stands out are individual responses to naked power and naked life in
representation. The ethical questions posed by much recent art are never about
the question of the aesthetic merit of the work alone. Nor is it just about linking
the content of the work to the moral claim of the art. Even if the empirical
grounding of such content is never literalised so as to assume unmitigated claims
of truth, the appearance of such content in visual representation always represents
a risk for both the art and artist, institution and spectator.
Identity Politics and the Rediscovery of the Human

in Contemporary Art
I have argued throughout this text that the location of the ethical in contem-
porary art, or the opposition of the ethical and aesthetic, arise precisely from the
legacy of human rights insofar as the category of the human is what is at stake. I
want to offer further examples for consideration in this discussion. When we
frame certain types of artistic practice around issues of identity-be it cultural,
gender-based, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality-we are basically wit-
nessing the serious force given each of these domains by human rights and its
evolution in the last fifty years. Each of these domains defines itself around and
against principles of power and rights. Consider, for instance certain activities of
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artists, such as Group Material who take up in their work methods of advocacy
around political subjectivity, education and health, or activist groups such as ACT
UP who work on the basis of enlightened self-interest in matters concerning the
AIDS crisis that ravaged the gay community in the 1980s, or Claude Lanzman's
epic film on the holocaust Shoah. Even Hollywood films such as Schindler's List
which took on the role of bearing witness on behalf of victims of the Holocaust
was founded upon identity discourses and the shroud of human rights that
envelopes each of them. The destabilising and subversive rapture often associated
with the work of Felix Gonzalez Torres (one of the most thorough and complex
convergences of the tension surrounding ethics and aesthetics); the ghostly
monologues on race and identity in Glen Ligon's coal dust and stenciled
paintings; the ambiguous and lugubrious archives that make up Christian
Boltanski's work are caught in this tension. Generalised images that appeal to our
sense of"humanity" or categorically reinvests the condition of the human with
contingency, works that take up the excursus of trauma: a flash of the tumescent
flesh of the wounded body or the wordless scream of the witness before a
catastrophe are just as equally implicated in this account. Thus, the more practices
and discourses of contemporary art recognise these categories as legitimate
artistic strategies the more human rights will ever remain both the silent
narrative and specter that haunts the ethical and aesthetic in contemporary art.
Documenta 11 and the Documentary as a Form

of Unraveling Truth
I now wish to consider the effect of these questions as it bears on the reception
of Documenta 11, for which I served as the artistic director between 1998 and
2002. To many observers, Documenta 11 was the culmination of a development
in contemporary art in which increasingly the documentary form became the
dominant artistic language, particularly in photographic, film and video work
represented in its fifth platform: the exhibition. The surplus of modes of the
"documentary," whether materialist or indexical, the "over compensation" in the
exhibition of works with a "political agenda," the "overwhelming" relationship to
social life were read as ethical messages by the exhibition organisers to a jaded
global leftist public. Moreover such messages were held to reveal the ideological
proclivities of the organisers rather than their interest in traditional notions of art.
In fact, the exhibition was perceived as that moment when the global left's
"evangelical" zeal and concern with human rights led to severe reduction in the
aesthetic nature of the art and thus promoted a certain political pleading by the
many documentaries of a view of the world shaped by politics more than art_30
In this account, the documentary not only trumps art, it subordinates it so
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEAlAND JOURNAl OF ART
completely that any relation to art is vitiated by the curatorial agenda.

Understood so tendentiously the bliss of the autonomy of art freed from any
socio-political regulation ends precisely at that moment when the opposition
between ethics and aesthetics is established, thus forcing viewers to take sides. Of
course this account has little resemblance both to the exhibition that my
colleagues and I curated, or to the one I witnessed along with hundreds of
thousands of visitors to Kassel.
Some time has passed since the final segment; the fifth platform ofDocumenta
11 opened in Kassel in June, 2002. It now appears possible to revisit some of the
points made by its critics. Returning to the idea of the "unbounded" and
"undisciplined" work, as a frame around which to articulate the general vicissi-
tude and unhomely condition of contemporary art, the project ofDocumenta 11
was to probe specific instances of this change. Most of you will remember that
the fifth platform was designated as the locus of the exhibition, part of the broad
visual field ofDocumenta 11 's project. You might also remember that the logic of
the Documenta 11 platforms was partly based on a set of discursive relationships
between sites of theoretical practice and those of visual practice, each site
elaborating on questions and ideas proper to its own field of discourse, but also
interrogating assumptions accruing to the other fields. Another element of the
discursive is the pursuit in the exhibition, to present and argue for works with an
awareness of their own intelligibility in the social context of today's world. The
discursive was however, not based on the relativisation of art and politics, the
cultural and the social, or even the ethical and the aesthetic. Neither was it based
on the usual opposition between the center and margin. The discursive was a
term employed to delineate the correspondence between systems of meaning;
between locations, publics, audiences, and institutions. It afforded us the ability to
be engaged with those disciplinary formations that arise precisely at the point
where visual practice can no longer claim sole legitimacy for the hermeneutic
function of art.
I could perhaps say this is where the notion of the ethical may be located in
Documenta 11, insofar as the ethical is concerned in the agonistic exchange
between different interlocutors; the relation with the other, what Foucault calls, in
a non-adversarial exchange, "reciprocal elucidations."3t This relation to the other
has often been explored in connection with the concept of truth. I am thinking of
truth here as akin to how Alain Badiou uses it as: "the real process of a fidelity to
an event: that which this fidelity produces (original italics) in the situation." 32 The
amanuensis of this truth is the other, evoked by Levinasian ethics in our
identification with the other, the other as a figure to whom we owe the possibility
of this absolute fidelity. The central concern for the other, the being-for-the-other
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DOCUMENTARY /VERITE
of which Levinas speaks, is the ground for the principle of the intersubjective that
governs the communicative principle of an exchange between two people.
Therefore, the concept of truth requires first that the other exists in every
intersubjective, reciprocal exchange. This is a recognition of the basis of power
relations. I do not use the other here in an ethnographical sense. Rather, in the
sense of the recognition of one's own limits in relation to another subjectivised
position, be it a text, an artwork, a spoken exchange. We initiate each of our
interactions in this regard with a fund of trust in the integrity of the subjectivised
position. The other, then, exists neither as an aberration nor as an opposition. She
exists, always, in dialectical relation to multiple modes of subjectivisation.
Let us return to Badiou. According to what he terms the ethic of a truth, the
relationship to the other,
is the principle that enables the continuation of a truth-process .. . that which

lends consistency to the presence if some-one in the composition if the subject induced
by the process of this truth. 33
If that be the case, the grounds of the ethical as such in Documenta 11 is not
in the relativisation of ethics and aesthetics, but in a middle course: the composition
if the subject induced by the process of this 'truth' what we chose to call the discursive
space between the spectator and the work of art. This means that Documenta 11
was, rather, an active, entangled field of procedures for which different
practitioners and publics shared responsibility, sometimes in mutual intelligibility
and sometimes not. Such a shared zone of responsibility is the zone of
subjectivised practices.
Reality Effect and the Representation of Social Life34

Now that Documenta 11 has become historical, in the sense, that it's evaluation
belongs both to the past and the present, we can look back to all its constitutive
parts and begin the task of unraveling both its proposals and its public reception.
When the exhibition first opened, to almost universal perplexity with regard to
its temporal and spatial density, a common idea came to define the nature of the
project, the idea that it was invested in what Barthes termed "the reality effect" in
its attunement to the representation of social life in multiple works. Kim Levin
the critic of the New York Village Voice proclaimed the exhibition the CNN
Documenta.3s Linda Nochlin who offered a careful reading of works in the
exhibition, saw images in the exhibition as supported by various and expanded
accounts of the documentary. She correctly noted the degree to which many
works functioned at the level of the relationship between images and social
25
reality.36 Despite these, the critical misappraisal and misapprehension of the

structural and critical intent of the exhibition to elaborate on the reasons why
artists_ and other image-makers had become obsessed with reality_as such and the
representation of everyday life, along with their effects on contemporary
consciousness, was noteworthy in this sense. Not only was the problematic of the
documentary as more than an account of the political subjectivity of its makers
elided, the exhibition's multiple organisation of images, forms, practices and
discursive fields could only be perceived through the rubric of the documentary
mode precisely because it clashed with traditional understanding of what the
work of art is relative to social reality.
A simple tour of the exhibition venues confirms the curatorial cornerstone of
our project, namely to generate in a comprehensive, systematic, taxonomic, and
typological fashion and to demonstrate through a number of complex
morphologies the ways through which the logic of the archive and document
suffuse and penetrate activities of art and procedures of image production in the
last 40 years. The disparate and oftentimes antagonistic procedures-such as one
finds in Allan Sekula's Fish Story; Alfredo Jaar's, Bernd and Hilla Becher's Half-
Timbered Houses of the Seigen Industrial Zone; Jef Gey's Day and Night and Day ... ;
Zarina Bhimji's Out of Blue, Fiona Tan's Countenance; Igloolik Isuma Production's
Nunavut (Our Land); Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth's Song--are not
reducible to documentary as such.
A brief excursion into the formal and scopic conception of each of the works
cited above provides a fascinating map and disorients the reading of the term
"documentary" as a specific mode of photographic or filmic articulation of
reality. In fact, there are many more works in the exhibition that complicate even
more the documentarist thrust. For example Isaac Julien's probing film on
paradise and loss in Paradise Omeros; Steve McQueen's double meditation on
history, labor, and exile in ~stern Deep and Carib's Leap, Ulrike Ottinger's Sud
Ost Passage, a melancholic traversal of the anonymous, abandoned, yet thriving
and alive, corners of old cities in the second world; Amar Kanwar's A Season
Outside, a wrenching cinematic tone poem on partition blues acted out daily at
the border crossing that separates India and Pakistan at Wagah, the result of the
last colonial act at remapping postcolonial spaces; Eyal Sivan's The Specialist
Eichmann in Jerusalem and Itsemba Itsemba: One Genocide later. Might one be
consoled to learn that all these disparate works while surely "documentary" in
the limited sense applied to them by inattentive critics, do not as a rule share in
the devalued image machine we often ascribe when using the epithet
"photojournalism," especially in the predatory form of stalking sensational
pictures as a hunter would stalk game?37 In fact, an artist like Touhami Ennadre,
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DOCUMENTARY /VERITE
who presented in the exhibition a study of the grief and mourning surrounding
the destruction of the World Trade Center, vigorously disputes any attempt to
associate his work with such an epithet. Even the more benign term
"documentary" does not satisfy him in terms of what he believes to be the
purpose of his photographic work: to make singular photographic work that
speaks to the authenticity of each given situation to the degree the photograph
can no longer be read as just mere information. Yet Chantal Akerman embraces
the contradiction with the documentary inherent in film firmly in her cinematic
practice in which the image serves both a heuristic purpose and an aesthetic one.
She, who is herself the child of Holocaust survivors, makes no secret of her
identification with victims, which oftentimes is perceived as part of the ideo-
logical baggage much documentary work carries. Her film D'est, which tracks
the endlessness of the vast emptiness that attended the dissolution of the Soviet
empire, is remarkable not only for its oneiric quality, but also for its gritty
realism. Watching the blue haze that coats the mood of the film, one literally has
the feeling of watching dusk settling on the after-life of the second world. The
film can therefore be read as a kind of summa of that after-life.
Verite, Reality, Affect

So far I have been commenting on one peculiar terminology: the word
"documentary" which was recurrent in most commentaries about images in
Documenta 11. Now what I wish to do is to introduce a second term: the
French word verite. I propose that we explore the questions raised by the term
documentary by interpellating it with verite.
The term documentary often refers to a set of techniques and types of images
directed at, and drawn from, the "real" world. The general dispensation of such
techniques, and the purloined "reality" they embalm as images, are commonly
understood to be distinctly organised to interact with and comment directly on
that "reality." This type of work generally is typified by an attitude of commis-
eration with the subject of the documentary, and where violence or catastrophe
is present with the pain of the subject, that is, to the real. Such work as largely
found in the media is said to refer to real things or events in the world; that is as
evidence of unvarnished truth of the real. But today, with "reality television"
ascendant, the scope of its affective simultaneity makes the documentary mode
appear somehow quaint in comparison, in some cases even outmoded due to the
delay in its transmission. 38
However, what haunts the documentary most is the charge of maudlin
moralism directed at its products. Let us dwell a little on this idea of documentary;
which despite its susceptibility to moral relativism and appeal to a false
27
consciousness of which its critics accuse it, has a very rich and distinguished
tradition. Almost all the important photographers of the modern era-Eugene
Atget, Walker Evans, August Sander, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, David
Goldblatt, Bernd and Hilla Becher-have worked within the documentary mode,
if we understand the nature of the documentary mode as simultaneously analytic
and mimetic. As such, the documentary has the unique position ofbeing caught in
a tautological game, which is to both document and analyze, to show and define
and to do so with both aesthetic means and also to be oblivious of aesthetic. For
some, it is a matter of taste: the rawer the image the more authentic the structure
of feeling it supposedly evokes. For others, the more discreet and anti-spectacular
the image, the more correspondingly distanced it is from its subject, the greater its
putative objectivity. But even if the most refined aesthetic procedures were
employed in a work, because of the tendency to categorise the documentary as a
mode of practice consistently prepared to show and ask moral questions around
what it documents, it is the documentary as a massive body of evidence we end up
most seeing. To certain catholic tastes, the more the ethical confronts the
documentary, the more distance from aestheticisation it must assume. For such
spectators, to aestheticise human suffering is an obscenity. This accusation is often
directed against the work of a photographer like Sebastaio Salgado; less so for
Gilles Peres and becomes quite controversial in the case of Susan Meiselas.
Yet when we look at the softcore pictures of distress and poverty by the likes
ofWalker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and other photographers who documented
the American depression in the 1930s, there is little moral outrage in the
reduction of poverty to certain social types by urbane, middle class photo-
graphers roughing it amongst the dejected mass of tenant farmers in drought-
blighted tenant farms of the South or the tenements of the large cities. Even
Jacob Riis's late nineteenth century moral crusades in his study of the squalor
and appalling living conditions in overcrowded tenements of New York's Lower
East Side in How the Other Half Lives is a product of a different type of moral
imperative. Perhaps this is so because these images, which were mostly from
before 1940, precede the period of the discourse of victims. The opposition
between the ethical and aesthetic or the political and poetic, as I have been trying
to demonstrate, has a long running history. But the vehemence of this opposition
today in documentary forms of work is informed mostly by the rise of discourse
of victims scattered all over the global peripheries that saturate the media today.
And with this rise of victims a peculiar form of scopophobia, an anti-
ocularcentric vision has settled over the field of the documentary. 39 I do not,
however, wish to recuperate the documentary form with all its unresolved
anomalies within what many would believe to be a more superior aesthetic
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system. For me the documentary as such has its own integrity, even if its claims of
truth remain dubious.
The documentary is also dominated by a view that it is a kind of testimony
which on the one hand produces a moral imperative in the telltale details of the
real, and on the other its assertion of truth in the manner in which it conveys and
conducts its judgment of events and depictions of people, things, objects. Even if
the documentary is never incontrovertibly called to present a moral judgment
but to document; to record; to archive or simply to present, the overwhelming
ethical ground it claims often subtend more nuanced positions.
The documentary admits into its methods diverse structures of reference: for
example, evidence, testimony, bearing witness. Above all it is mnemonic. The
documentary's relationship to its subject, in spite of its bold assertions of truth
claims, is an ambiguous one. One of the most shocking pictures I have ever
encountered in the media was reproduced almost a decade ago on the front page
of The New York Times. The picture, taken by Kevin Carter, a South African
photographer, shows a young, exhausted Sudanese refugee child bent over on his
hands and knees. The chilling image, which I can only now conjure from
memory, is a tightly composed picture, in which the circularity of the camera
cuts to a diagonal so as to align the looming frame of the child, with that of a
vulture standing behind him, observing, waiting. Two things come back to me
from that decade-old experience of the photograph and my feeling as a spectator
of the image: the remoteness and ambiguity of the photographer from the scene
and my own haunted curiosity of the ultimate fate of the child. The latter is what
the documentary never discloses: the aftermath. The reception of this picture
across the world was spectacular. It raised a range of ethical issues, the most
obvious of which was: what, if anything, did the photographer do to save the
vulnerable abandoned child. Moral outrage at the picture and at the
photographer was mingled with dumb admiration of the photographer's courage
in recording such a harrowing scene, for rescuing the child, if only as image, from
the anonymity of his fate. Of course, the photographer won all kinds of awards
for his effort. Carter was overwhelmed, by the attention and the debate
surrounding the picture. He committed suicide shortly thereafter. 4
Memento Mori: The Archive as a Site of Mourning

I have used this example to raise the unanswerable question of the documentary's
ambiguity to its subject and to pose the question: whether it makes any sense to
collapse ethics and aesthetics in a single discussion of art's relationship to its
subject. Here, I want to call attention to Christian Boltanski's blurry pictures of
"holocaust" children and parts of Gerhard Richter's exhaustive archive Atlas. 41
29
Boltanski's massive reorganisation of photographs of anonymous children, which

blurs and exposes the faces of innocence comes closest to the use of the
documentary as a method of bearing witness and a tool of memorialisation: the
archive as mnemonic machine. Richter's Atlas evinces a different relationship to
this machine in that he deliberately collapses the borders between the private and
public, the personal and political, the quotidian and banal with the profound. His
is an atlas of"perpetual commentary" on the subject oflooking and the function
of images in constituting social memory in the aftermath of Nazism and within
modern culture. Atlas is an inventory of massive, inexhaustible potential that
either forecloses meaning due to its unwieldy heterogeneity or manipulates the
scales and legibility of what is represented, thereby actively reading them, a priori,
as nothing but an arbitrary juxtaposition of meaningless images. But is Atlas, in its
obsessive documentary attempt at collectivisation of personal and public
memory, truly arbitrary? Or does its effect of distance, not a critical attempt to
bring to bear a great degree of complexity in the secondary career images assume
outside of their context as reference, as memento mori? Such memento mori is
registered in the early beginning of this ambitious historical project. In panels 16,
17 and 18 Richter shows us newspaper images of Nazi soldiers publically
humiliating their victims and of the liberated Nazi camps which depict
emaciated survivors amid jumbled piles of bleached corpses of those who did not
survive. And years later in panels 470, 471, 472, 473 images of the Baader-
Meinhof gang joins the roll-call of the memorialised. Panel 471 is in fact a
reproduction of Richter's painting from a newspaper reproduction of Ulrike
Meinhof's suicide. The temporal lag between the Nazi camp images and that of
the terrorist gang does nothing to alleviate the context of the historical space
from which this comparatively benign investigation is being conducted. As if to
foreground what Hannah Arendt identified as the banality of evil, Richter
intersperses throughout the breadth of his magna opus, images of domestic
tranquility, his studio, holiday pictures, pictures of his own work, etcetera. 42
Blindspot, Blank stare, Scopophobia and the Hole in Vision

How are we to read the images and historical accounts both Boltanski and
Richter seek to reindex? Surely, to see Richter's Herculean effort at structural
collectivisation of private and public, personal and political histories as dis-
interested and merely ambiguous is to be blind to it. Such a reaction exemplifies
a consistent aporia in contemporary art's approach to the documentary. A
remarkable body of literature has been developed around this question. The
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben makes a crucial point about Auschwitz in
this context. He writes that "The aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia
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of historical knowledge; a non-coincidence between fact and truth, between

verification and comprehension."43
Perhaps, then, this crisis, this confusion between fact and truth, verification and
comprehension linked to the documentary may have its source at the level in
which the documentary confronts the monstrous, the absolute, indissoluble
reduction of human suffering to abject status and spectacle. It was Foucault who
wrote vociferously about the indignity of speaking for others. Which poses the
question to Sontag's fascinating and coruscating self-reflexive analysis of docu-
mentary pictures in her recent book Regarding the Pain of Others: whence does
one open oneself up to another's pain, a process which again recalls Levinas'
ethics of being-for-the-other? If the documentary is a testimony, as Sontag
argues, to a calamity, a record of an event, a representation of an actuality, it is
exegetic and seemingly eidetic. Yet it is neither mastery nor totality. As such, it
can only communicate as a fragment. How do we trust or question that which
the documentary presents beyond blind acceptance of its ethical correctness or
obdurate distrust of its politics? The neutralising assumption of a spectatorship,
which averts its gaze and turns askance from the documentary because it deeply
distrusts it as a moral accusation, cannot at the same time judge it. To avert one's
eyes, to look askance, is equally an ethical stance; it is to ask not to be accused;
not to be contaminated, to not exist purely for the other, to be cleansed from the
guilt of looking at human misery; relieved from the burden of being-for-the-
other. Yet there is a level at which this disavowal when excessively interpreted in
the direction of the non-western other, (as a critic like Matthew Higgs did in
relation to images in Documenta 11) registers at a deeper level two kinds of
disavowal: a scopophobic inattention to the specificity of the image and a
reflexive xenophobia unable to imagine the other as properly human. 44 This
turning away, this hole in vision, as I have argued earlier in this text, perhaps has
its basis not in any superior moral vision, but is precisely a prophylactic to the
obscenity of the human ruin.
Let us return to conventional documentary images, more specifically
photographic and cinematic (as well as video) images that capture slices of what
some call "the real world." The root of the term "documentary" is the document.
In its literal term it is a record or evidence of something that proves the existence
or the occurrence of that which the document records, hence the claim of
"truth" often imputed to the documentary. But to document is never to make
immanent a singular overwhelming truth. It is simply to collect in different forms
a series of statements (what Foucault calls "statement events" as the enunciative
function of the archive) leading to the interpretation ofhistorical events or facts.4S
The documentary as such is never outrightly a claim of truth, namely, that this
31
happened therefore it is true. In its relentless singularisation, in the guise of

bearing witness to that which is part of our reality, even if it may be outside our
immediate experience, the documentary claims for itself the burden of truth in
that it directs itself to what it sees as recordable reality.
To document is to offer statements that stand for evidence of something: a
truth, a testimony to some truth. It is impossible for any image to fully disclose
the reality that hangs like a pall over the extended field in which all images exist
irrespective of Guy Debord's claim that we all now live in a world of appearances
where all social relationships have disappeared into the screen of mediation.46
Let's take any "documentary" image, say a war scene in Afghanistan and as a rule
of thumb test its veracity. On the one hand, one can look at scenes of the war's
carnage: ruined streets, piled-up corpses, disconsolate populace and come away
with the reasonable belief that what the scenes show is the misery of war. At the
same time, the same image can never fully support whatever the rationale that
supports the war, such as the moral correctness of rooting out terrorists. What do
we see when we behold the prone, dead corpse of a Taliban soldier: evidence of
"here is a dead terrorist" or "here is an Islamic martyr?" The abeyance into which
such an image is cast is no longer merely semantic or simply ideological. 47 The
photograph is not at any rate a codeless message or a messageless code. 48 In a sort
of contradiction, despite the persistence of the eye to see into and through such a
scene, no reading of it would ever prove adequate nor summarise the import of
its message. Literally such scenes induce a kind of blindness, excavate a hole in
vision. Because of the vast extended visual field in which such images exist, it
appears quite the case that a documentary can record something that is true but
fail to reveal the truth of that something, in the sense that it may actually
misrepresent the subject in question. This is the given paradox of the docu-
mentary, namely its lack of self-evidence. This was, I suspect, part of the antipathy
towards the documentary mode critics associated with Documenta 11.
The Documentary and the Scriptible

It is already difficult enough that professional documentarist continuously work a
thin line between compromise and heroism, that to add to the cache of images
produced by them with the vast quantity of amateur images frays the truthfulness
and the facticity of the documentary. The advent of technological ability has
meant the wide availability to casual users of cameras. As such the documentary, as
Barthes says of certain forms of writing is "scriptible," because it turns the reader
into a kind of writer, that is it makes the reader wish to carry further the act of
writing, encouraging the imitation of the act of writing. 49 The documentary
could also be perceived as scriptible in that it increasingly turns the casual
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spectator into an expert witness. It encourages all kinds of acts of wanting to

further the work of documenting, creating new narratives of the real world,
adding, as it were, to the vast body of evidence. In a sense, everyone who possesses
a camera could, by definition function as a documentarist. A famous example of
some such transformation of the documentary genre by whoever possesses a
camera is George Halliday's video record of Rodney King being beaten by a
group of Los Angeles police officers. But does the mere possession of a camera
and shooting the real world imbue us immediately with authority as modern day
truth tellers?
This was the dilemma of Halliday as a witness, with his mechanical eye. He
was too busy filming the scene of the assault to bother seeing it with his own
eyes. Instead the camera came to replace his vision, literally his capacity to see. To
move then from the passive position of the one who watches, who gazes at such
a scene, or as the receiver of its images on screen to a producer of those images is
to shift into a remarkable position of responsibility. Such responsibility is what
made Halliday not just a proper witness but also a double witness whose two sets
of vision must be corroborated according to the mysterious workings of the law.
The position of the double witness I believe, is what sets up the opposition
between art and documentary heard quite frequently during the days of the
opening of Documenta 11 and afterwards, the idea that the collection of images
which critics had organised under the rubric of documentary are essentially two
things: (1) they are "scriptible," meaning that anyone with a camera can also record
images of atrocities or poverty, but not everyone can be an artist in a convincing
way. In a sense this is a denigration of the technical facility which mechanical
reproduction promotes; (2) this scriptibility of the documentary, especially its
mimetic proclivities, removes it from the realm of art. But for some critics what
actually grates is not simply the provincial art versus documentary argument, but
the audacity of any image to designate a reality to which viewers have limited, and
oftentimes no experience of at all. The documentary for such people relates only
to a shallow kind of truth, due to its dependence on causality. Art, so the argument
goes, evidences a deeper kind of truth, for it is not dependent on any external
determinant other than its own internal reality. This kind of argument is familiar
to many of us who at one time or another have been confronted with the opposi-
tion between art as something specific and unique and documentary as something
that manifests only a kind of social concern with limited creative purchase.
I cannot wholly dismiss the argument that many works in Documenta 11 can
be confused with the documentary mode. Some of the works can be thought as
such insofar as the devices, the stringing and sequencing of images or the
narrative procedures of certain analytical or conceptual frames of certain works
33
use material drawn directly from the social world at large. Herein lies my own
distinction, rather than accepting exclusively the term "documentary" as a way to
understand the manner in which the exhibition purportedly privileged the
documentation of the real world or the analysis of social reality I wish to address
the documentary versus art issue by inserting into the field of Documenta 11 's
vision the concept of verite.
Verite has been defined as: truth. But also it refers to lifelikeness, a trueness to
life. In the latter definition it is predisposed towards mimeticism. For example, in
French, verite also means to strive to be true to life in art: s'ifforcer a la verite en art.
Similarly verite refers to realism to real life, naturalism, authenticity, pragmatism,
verisimilitude. In the documentary mode we are presently reviewing verite
involves also the kind of documentary practice born in France in 1960s known
as cinema verite that blurs the line between reality and simulated reality.
The meaning of the term "documentary" that was of philosophical interest to
our main purpose-and I believe this was demonstrated throughout the entire
length and breadth of the project, in all the platforms, publications, symposia,
workshops, ecetera-refers to Agamben's idea of bare life or naked life. Bare life
or naked life as such is connected to that dimension of experience which he
defines as a form-of-life, "a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in
which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life."so
Bio-politics, then, is both the conceptual envelope and the philosophical
determinant for how the loose term "documentary" came to inhabit such a
palpable space in the galleries of the exhibition. The hinge for the examination of
naked or bare life is the verite I documentary space. So, on the one hand, in the idea
of verite we confront the conditionalities of "truth" as a process of unraveling,
exploring, questioning, probing, analysing, diagnosing, a search for truth or shall
we say veracity. Whilst for the documentary mode on the other hand, there is a
purposive, forensic inclination concerned essentially with the recording of dry
facts to be submitted to the verite committee. It is here that the pure relationship
between documentary and verite become clearer, for they each define the
relationship between the spectator and the image - what in Camera Lucida,
Barthes defined as the studium. The interplay between fact and truth; compre-
hension and verification is the agitated field of the studium, for "to recognise the
studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer's intentions, to enter into
harmony with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand
them, to argue with them within myself, for culture (from which the studium
derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers".sl This is what
governs the relationship between the documentary and verite, since there is
nothing inherently true or factual in the documented image if the purpose of
34
DOCUMENTARY /VERITE
such a documentation does not further ask the viewer to approach such
documentation as not only just a fact of something real in the world, but also
something true in the social condition of that world which is difficult to support
in a single film frame or photographic image.
If this holds true, perhaps then the response to the documentary mode in
Documenta 11 may lead us to assume that the recursive persistence of what many
came to see as documentary in the exhibition already points to an exhaustion of
the mode, an exhaustion that not only complicates the viewer's relationship to the
particular social world being examined, but in fact explodes that social world as
nothing but a body of excess. Thus to recoil from the documentary is to return to
doubts we each harbor about the nature of its representations of events or the
world as real and therefore true. This apprehension is even more acute in the
context of the general control and regulation of the media by powerful interests.
To disbelieve what is presented as the truth about the world, may in fact lend itself
to distrust of the messenger rather than the message. The less that documentary
exposes truth about the world in favor of an excess of reality over which we have
little control and even less of a choice of full comprehension, the more it seems
that spectators turn from it.
Epilogue
In conclusion, it might be important to restate the view that the role often
assigned documentary forms exists in the tension between their aesthetic
intention and ethical position vis-a-vis the subject of the documentary. The
second point about the documentary form concerns its mnemonic function in
relation to the archive that brings into visibility the relationship between images,
documents, and systems of meaning. But it also involves a struggle between two
irresolvable positions in our news-saturated, mediated world. W J T Mitchell in
his essay The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies, began his searching assessment
of the photographic medium and language, by positing the idea that "The
relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and
power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images
and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity."S2
The question could be asked: when do images lose their "conscience, their
aesthetic and ethical identity?" This is a question that does not have any answers
that are not unhelpfully speculative. In spite of attempts to discredit the place of
the documentary image in exhibitions of contemporary art (in my view a highly
dubious denial in an already prolix world of images and usage) the broad
category of images in Documenta 11 nevertheless surpass the documentary
reflex. The complex variety of approaches to be found in the genre in itself
35
points to the importance of adjusting the reductive prejudices that strip images
down to only their functionalist format.
This was precisely what we found in the lengthy research and communi-
cations with artists, theorists, activists, architects, institutions-across cultures and
continents, disciplines and communities, institutions and networks (formal and
informal): there are no fixed messages that attach to the designation
documentary. We worked with artists and thinkers producing ideas and images on
an understanding of their practice within the broader parameters of the changing
relationship between artist and audience; discourse and language, addressing
questions that were far less predicated on predetermined meanings, but open to
interpellation to other activities, actions, events, and discourses. When an artist
group like Huit Facettes emerges in Senegal to question the efficacy of the
individual artist's relation to his context of production and public, what does
their alliance with the rural community of Hamdallaye in Senegal mean and how
does it show this complex relations of power? And by what means does Le
Groupe Amos in the Democratic Republic of Congo organise public
manifestations, produce documentary films on gender and sexual relationship,
economic production, on flows of labor and capital; conduct clinics on demo-
cracy and development; teach workshops on gender equality; lead workshops on
tolerance as the first condition of a democratic society, or participate as observers
in the peace negotiations between the different factions of rebel movements that
have made Democratic Republic of the Congo ungovernable communicate to
their audience the work it produces in the name of acting on behalf of
Congolese civil society? How do we apprehend the important proposals of Park
Fiction working in the suburbs of Hamburg in a long running project to
mobilise the marginalised community of St. Pauli against the gentrification of
their neighborhood by speculative real estate ventures, proposing instead a park
rather than another bland modernist architecture that weakens the link between
social relationships and community identity? In the same affiliative spirit of urban
and territorial analysis, we find the important project of Fareed Armaly: From /To
working in collaboration with the filmmaker Rashid Mashrawi on a reading of
the scattered trajectories of Palestinian dispersion and fragmentation into
multiple communities of exile and diaspora. Or the Italian group Multiplicity in
a provocative attempt to retrace and reconstruct the tragedy and lives of migrants
and refugees whose illegal smuggling ship sank and disappeared during one night
of tempest in the Clandestini basin of the Mediterranean sea in Solid Sea. From
Alejandra Riera and Doina Petrescu's Association des pas which concerns the
political and cultural subjectivity of the Kurdish community in Turkey, rendered
as a poetics of social and political analysis of representation to Raqs Media
36
DOCUMENTARY /VERITE
Collective's Coordinates: New Delhi, which abjures the ideological territorial-

isation of marginality imposed by the state on urban forms; to Black Audio Film
Collective's probing documentary film which investigates the causes of black
urban riots during Margaret Thatcher's rule in Handsworth Songs; to Trinh T
Mihn Ha's film, a meditation on slow time and cultural spaces thriving outside
the totalising gaze of globalisation in Naked Spaces: Living is Round; to Allan
Sekula in Fish Story, tracing the containerised motor of global labor flows; to
sonic and visual fields which act as mnemonic triggers in Craigie Horsfield's El
Hierro Project; Thomas Hirschhorn in Bataille Monument; a materialised
documentary dedicated to the life and work of the French philosopher; or the
discourse of an African claim to modernity enacted in the Biblioteque and
Museum Shop sections of Meshac Gaba's Museum for Contemporary African Art; or
Walid Raad/ Atlas Group's documentary fictions in Missing Lebanese Wars which
preys on the manipulation between the warring factions of Lebanon, and the
struggle for control of the archival memory of the civil war in order to penetrate
the larger "truth" of that civil conflict. Those are just some of many examples.
Each of these artists in Documenta 11 employ the tools of the documentary and
the function of the archive as procedures for inducting new flows and
transactions between images, texts, narratives, documents, statements, events,
communities, institutions, audiences. And each confounds the role of the
documentary in establishing a hierarchy between images and artistic forms,
between ethics and aesthetics, politics and poetics, truth and fiction. In fact, in
each of the individual positions and works mentioned throughout this text, what
stands out the most is the remarkable consistency of concern with social life that
is a mixture of political interest (Armally, Sekula, Jaar); sociological (Raqs Media
Collective, Multiplicity, Black Audio Film Collective, Ottinger, Igloolik Isuma
Productions) aesthetic (Steve McQueen,Julien); and archival GefGeys).Above all
it is the concern with the other, the fidelity to a truth that the documentary
ceaselessly constructs and deconstructs. Let me end with Martin Jay's eloquent
and succinct remark in which he cautions that "There is 'no view from nowhere'
for even the most scrupulously 'detached' observer."S3 And so it is with all of us
who at one time or another survey the ruin of modernity: there is no here from
which to view disinterestedly that elsewhere that purportedly is the province of
the documentary. Vision, whether blind or seeing is always invested with a
function of apprehending the visual in a manner far more extensive and complex
than what the eye ultimately sees. And what truths can images tell us when they
are drowning in the continental drift set up by modern media industries?
Okwui Enwezor, International contemporary art curator and critic
37
AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEAlAND JOURNAl OF ART
NOTES
I would like to extend a note of thanks to Terry Smith, Barbara Vanderlinden for their astute
comments and Tom Keenan for his careful reading of the essay.
1 Theodor W Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber
(Cambridge: MIT P, 1983)185.
2 Emmanuel Levinas, "Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other" Entre Nous: Thinking-if-the-Other,
trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia UP, 1998) 221.
3 See Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon" Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions
and judgments, 1939-1944, vol. 1, ed.John O'Brian (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 23-38.
4 Irit Rogoff, "Art/Theory/Elsewhere," "Dossier on Documenta 11," Texte zur Kunst (August,
2002).
5 Okwui Enwezor, "At Home in the World: African Writers and Artists in 'Ex-Ile'," Kunst- !M?lten
in Dialog: Von Gauguin zur Globalen Gegenwart, ed. Marc Scheps,Yilmaz Dziewior and Barbara
M. Thiemann (Koln: Dumont, 1999) 330-6.
6 Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone P, 2000) 33.
7 I borrow the notion of indiscipline from Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens Hoffinan's curatorial
project "Indiscipline" where they, along with a multifaceted group of practitioners, explored
the nature of creative agency in the face of the breakdown between disciplines and forms of
art in Brussels in 2000. See Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens Hoffman, Indiscipline (Brussels:
Roomade, 2000) unpaginated brochure.
8 Ibid.
9 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd Ed, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998). Arendt's
discussion of Vita Activa, in which she identifies three forms of human activity-labor, work, and
action-as the fundamental condition oflife, as that which invests positive content in all human
life, is important in the context of the idea of bio-politics. See also Michel Foucault, "Right of
Death and Power over Life," The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984)
267. Foucault comments that in the discourse of bio-politics "what we have seen has been a
very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned
back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law that
became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations
concerning rights. The 'right' to life, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of
needs and, beyond all the oppressions or 'alienations,' the 'right'-which the classical juridical
system was utterly incapable of comprehending-was the political response to all these new
procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty".
10 In his humanist-oriented essay The Three Ecologies, Guattari spells out an interesting program of
thought that reiterates the debate on the human in what he calls Ecosophy. In this philosophy,
in which he deals with the disastrous consequences for the present ecological system based on
man-made changes, there is a triangulation of what he calls an "ethico-political articulation ...
between the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity ... " Guattari, The Three
Ecologies 28. He brings these three intersecting questions to rest on the "ecosophic
problematic ... of the production of human existence itself in new historical contexts". Ibid 34.
11 For the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights see www. un.org/
OverviewI rights
12 Michel Foucault, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans.
Vinceno Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 7.
38
DOCUMENTARY /VERITE
13 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain cif Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003). Lucid and
mesmerizing, Sontag attacks the pervasive contemporary apperception of images of violence,
the blind stare which detaches itself from the "Pain of Others" through recourse to absurd
rationalisations.
14 See Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and jew Narrate the Palestinian Village
(Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998) for a scrupulous and moving account of the conver-
gence of two positions of the victim in the historic debate on the politics of dispossession.
15 Jean Baudrillard pushed this form of argument to a new level of absurdity in his book The
Gulf War did not Happen. Baudrillard's canard deploys his familiar theory of the simulacrum in
which all representation disappears into the image, with mass media serving as the screen
(both in the literal sense and in the sense of concealment) through which we perceive reality,
in order to insist that what the first GulfWar amounted to was nothing more than a media
spectacle, a virtualization of the image of war that distorts the actuality of that war. While one
can certainly agree that the American prosecution of the war gave the impression of the war as
an electronic video screen in the early days of the war, subsequent documentary footage of
bombed out Baghdad and the infamous "highway of death" refutes the excitation of over
theorization provided by his analysis. Sontag's point is that all too often, we shy away from the
terrible suffering because we search for an enlightened response that absolves us from seeing
what lies immediately before our field of perception.
16 Ariella Azoulay, Death's Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, trans. Ruvik
Danieli (Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 2001) 4.
17 For Kant's aesthetic theory from which much debate on the question of the aesthetic in art
draws see his 1764 essay "The Sense of the Beautiful and of the Sublime" in Philosophy of
Immannuel Kant: Immanuel Kant's Moral and Political Writings, ed. Carl]. Friedrich (New York:
The Modern Library, 1949).
18 WB.Yeats, "Easter 1916," The Collected Works cifWB. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. Richard Finneran (New
York: MacMillan, 1989).
19 For a full account of Kein Mensch ist Illegal's work see Florian Schneider/Kein Mensch ist
Illegal, "New Rules of the New Actonomy 3.0," Democracy Unrealized: Documenta11_Plaiform
1, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Sarat Maharaj, et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz,
2002) 179-93; see also http:/ /new.actonomy.org for further development of its work.
20 Sarat Maharaj's essay in Education, Information, Entertainment. Current Approaches on Higher Artistic
Education, ed. Ute Meta Bauer (Vienna: Edition Selene, 2001).
21 Ruth Wodak, "Inequality, Democracy and Parliamentary Discourses," Democracy Unrealized, ed.
Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash,
Octavia Zaya (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002) 151-68.
22 Hannah Arendt, The Origins cifTotalitarianism (San Diego and New York: Harcourt, 1968). For a
particularly thorough analysis of the development of the concept of race as justification for,
and incitement to, dispossession of civil and human rights see the chapter "Race and
Bureaucracy" 185-221.
23 In Europe in the last decade there has been a particularly intense upsurge of racist far right and
neo-Nazi political parties such as Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in France,Jorg Haider's
Freedom Party in Austria, Filip Dewinter's Vlaams Blok in Belgium, Pim Fortuyn's Lijst Pim
Fortuyn in Holland, the election of the nationalist right wing ruling party in Denmark,
amongst others entering into the political mainstream. The spectacular results achieved by Le
39
Pen and Haider in recent elections makes clear that these developments are part of the
mainstreaming of racial discourse in the affirmative populist politics and culture, especially in
Europe. See for example Etienne Balibar, "Racism and Crisis;' Etienne Balibar and Immanuel
Wallerstein, Racism, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991) 217-27.
24 See W:E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989) first published in 1903.
Dubois was perhaps the first thinker to draw our attention to the question of race in
modernity. In "Of the Dawn of Freedom," the second section of his classic treatment of race
and the American experience, he writes: "The problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the color-line-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [sic] in Asia
and Africa, in America and Islands of the sea." One hundred years after Dubois's treatise, Paul
Gilroy in a recent work Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line
(Cambridge, Mass: Belknap/Havard UP, 2000) has taken up and extended this theme in a
powerful anti-clerical critique of the persistence of racial discourse in contemporary culture.
25 More than any other group of thinkers it is revolutionary third-world, anti-colonial intellec-
tuals who foregrounded bio-politics more than class as the founding principle of all political
and cultural struggles. See for example Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles
Lam Markham (New York: Grove Press, 1967) particularly the chapter "The Negro and
Recognition." The concluding passage of the chapter sketches the degree to which the
struggle for the conception of the human has been made the object of all ethical and political
considerations of otherness. Fanon writes in this passage: "I said in my introduction that man is
a yes. I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to Life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also
a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the
butchery of what is most human in man: freedom".
26 For a full treatment of this subject see Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S.
Roudieez (NewYork,Columbia UP, 1991).
27 Recent anti-globalization battles in Seattle, Prague, Montreal Genoa, Guadalajara are instances
of the kind "unbounded" and "undisciplined" work being taken up by certain forms of
political art. There is now a recognition, even in such insular clubs as the Davos Economic
Summit in Switzerland, of the importance of culture as an instrument of economic policy
discussion. The organizers of Davos have since began inviting "cultural producers" to its
discussions on global governance.
28 For a fruitful reading of the task of the artist operating under the understanding of a political
commitment, see Walter Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer," Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schoken, 1978) 22(}-38; see
also Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988)
for his elaboration of the notion of committed literature.
29 Alfredo Jaar, It is Difficult: Ten Years and Let There be Light: The Rwanda Project, 1994-1998
(Barcelona: Actar, 1998).
30 A particularly disconcerted view of the exhibition could be read in the alarmed review of
Blake Gopnik the art critic of The Washington Post whose article drew out of thin air the
bizarre notion that the exhibition was anti-American. See Blake Gopnik, "Fully Freighted Art:
At Documenta 11, A Bumpy Ride for Art World's Avant-Garde," Washington Post Oune 16,
2002). Another view of the evangelical, puritanical attitude of the exhibition was offered by
Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, in his article, "Global Art Show
With an Agenda," The New York Times Oune 18, 2002).
40
DOCUMENTARY /VERITE
31 Michel Foucault, "Polemics, Politics and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel

Foucault," Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Essential W<Jrks of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997) 111.
32 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding if Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso,
2001) 42.
33 Ibid 44.
34 See Boris Groys, "Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation;' for a
highly nuanced discussion of the relationship between reality and representation of life as a
social fact within certain forms of artistic practice in Documenta11_Plaiform5: Exhibition, ed.
Okwui Enwezor eta!. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002) 108-14.
35 See Kim Levin, "Art in an International State of Emergency: The CNN Documenta," The
Village Voice (July 3-9, 2002).
36 See Linda Nochlin, "Documented Success," Ariforum (September 2002):159-63
37 A more apt term might be the distinction made by Walker Evans between the "documentary
style" and the documentary as a form.
38 From its earliest invention television has in one form or other experimented with a visual
sensorium directed at the recording and experience of reality in its most direct, unedited
aspect. From early incarnations such as Candid Camera (a not so subtle allusion to the
truthfulness of the camera) to the mushrooming variations on the theme of "Reality
Television," this fascination with "real" life is brought to a new level. What's impressive about
this turn is how "Reality Television" combines techniques of surveillance and spectacle,
thereby putting into question the claim of a documented reality. The tradition of the
documentary however goes back to the very beginning of cinema in films by the Lumiere
brothers and Thomas Edison and has remained impressively strong despite increasing
misgivings about its accuracy, first in ethnographic films (one thinks of the controversy that
continues to plague Flaherty's seminal ethno-documentary film Nanook of the North) and today
in the news media.
39 For a magisterial treatment of anti-ocularcentrism see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The
Denigration if Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994)
40 The circumstance of suicide has not been fully clarified. It's unclear therefore whether the
suicide was a result of the commotion caused by this particular picture or due to other
problems. Any inference of a connection to the publicity surrounding this image and his death
is not intended here.
41 See Benjamin Buchloh, "Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomie Archive," October 88 (Spring
1999):117-45
42 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in jerusalem: A Report on the Banality if Evil, rev. ed. (New York:
Penguin, 1994).
43 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants if Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999) 12.
44 See Matthew Higgs, "Same Old Same Old," Ariforum (September 2002): 166-7
45 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982)126-31.
46 Guy Debord, Society if the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994).
47 Sontag makes this point in Regarding the Pain if Others.
48 See Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message," A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New
41
York: Hill and Wang, 1982)194-210 .

49 See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1974).
50 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare
Casarino (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 2-3.
51 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1981) 27-8.
52 WJ.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1995) 281.
53 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes 18.
42

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art Article Explores Ethics and Aesthetics in Political Art

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Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art

ISSN: 1443-4318 (Print) 2203-1871 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raja20

Documentary/Vrit: Bio-Politics, Human Rights

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